Liveblogging! “ITDE” 4/21/07

Greetings, everyone! Liveblogging will be a bit crazy tonight– it’s pledge drive– so I’m doing the show, the liveblog, and manning the phones. I just got done playing the “ITDE” theme music, “Thrills and Kicks,” a homemade mix of Pixies, Jimmy Swaggart, Kalx, and EKV sounds I put together some years ago. I’d been wanting to play it the last couple weeks, but didn’t have the disc with me.

Now I’m playing from the Hymns release of Jeff Rehnlund’s “Our Thin Mercy of Error,” which is a really nice set of well-weathered field recordings, home taping errors, collage, and the haphazard Florida sound Hymns has been introducing me to lately. This is great stuff, especially the track “Raleigh,” which features a variety of odd field recordings from within restaurants, maybe a grocery store, on the street interviews, etc.

I told myself that I’d try to keep to shorter tracks for this show, so I could manage the pledge drive calls a bit easier, but I really want to play some longer stuff! The seventeen minutes of Felix Werder’s “Oscussion,” really blows my plans out of the water. I can’t deny it, though– Pogus has a habit of releasing things I either love already, or will be adding to the list after they hip me to it. Werder is in the latter category– I never heard of this fellow before! With three of the four tracks remastered from LP recordings, Pogus not only is bringing the obscure to light once again; they also have played a significant role in preserving worthy music for future listeners.This Werder material has gotten me in the mood to play the new Kim Cascone release, “Statistically Improbably Phrases,” oddly enough. To my ears, they don’t have a lot in common– Werder’s “Oscussion” is a rather rich, organic palette of analog synthesizers and dynamic percussion… Cascone is presenting a decidedly stark mixture of granular cloud washes, ringing loops, and austere electronic processing. Perhaps I’m considering the relative impermeability of these two works, each inhabiting their own sonic realm, when I consider playing them back-to-back. I’m eager to see how well it works!

I think the Werder/Cascone juxtaposition is working out well. I’m especially impressed with the level of detail in Cascone’s disc; it is a challenging listen to focus deeply within the mix, as many of the sounds move quite quickly! This would be a great disc for noise fans interested to migrate more towards the academic side of the experimental spectrum as well.

That being said, I’m going to play from one of Mystified’s latest releases, “Iron,” now available on Turgid Animal Records. If you enjoyed his Roil Noise release “Instability,” this is a natural pick, with more of the “Instability” pieces on display. In much the same way that Cascone could bring some noisers to the microsound/electroacoustic table, Mystified’s work is a great entry point for the Max/MSP crowd to re-consider noise.

I’m playing from “Decore Sonore” now. As I mentioned on the air, this is a lovely album that gets me thinking about lots of things: the possible role that outside sounds can play in composition, the invisible “sphere” of where “acceptable” sounds reside and others are cut off, and the irony of improvisation and uncontrollable “natural” sounds meeting. After all, there’s nothing more relentless than an open window in a recording session!

I was happy to see Brian from the Gamer’s Guild (the show before mine) this week… but I gotta say… this show sure does seem short without that extra half hour! I just looked, and its already 5:45 a.m.

Now I’m playing from Richard Trosper’s “The Ocean,” a minidisc release on Public Eyesore Records, one of my favorite labels. It’s funny, as hard as I work to learn about new and existing experimental musicians, Public Eyesore has an amazing ability to find them way before me. I sometimes get a feeling like Bryan Day has some sort of subterranean artist connection that he visits nightly– the avant-garde version of Lovecraft’s short story “Pickman’s Model.”

I seem to be stuck in a minidisc feedback loop– I love playing these things! It’s a lot of fun to know that the music HAS to be over in 20 minutes or so– narrows the focus, but allows artists a bit of room to expand on an idea. Cool! So far, I played the Trosper material, Tuft’s “Cannibal Fantasy,” and now “Mad Blockhead’s Tale” from Kenji Siratori and Torturing Nurse. This is my wake-up call to the sleepy citizens of Southern Illinois. It is my ever-fervent hope that I am able to play something like this just as someone’s clock radio is going off. *laughs* Yes, I’m bad that way.

I think I’m going to play something I recorded, just for the heck of it. “Is There Anyone There?” was recorded recently, during a conference call with 15+ government agencies.

Update:This broadcast is now available for download as a single 64kbps mp3 file. As always, I encourage you to seek out the original recordings featured on this broadcast, and contact me if you require any assistance doing so. Thanks for listening, and for visiting STARTLING MONIKER. –DaveX